Column Oxford wife-killer dies in prison, but pain remains

Jacqueline SmithJanuary 31, 2019

Doug and Merry Jackson were sitting side-by-side on the couch watching TV when out of the blue the call came from the state Corrections Department. Scott Gellatly was dead. Their son-in-law — who shot to death their youngest daughter Lori, tried to kill Merry, and who shot Nika, the German Shepard trying to protect them — met his fate.

“I almost didn’t answer the phone, it was an 860 number,” Doug recalls this week of the call that came four days before Christmas. “They said they found Scott unresponsive in his cell, dead. That’s all they could tell us.”

“One thing, you feel bad, in a way, it was a human life,” Doug says. “But in another way, we felt relief.

“Always in the back of my mind, I worried he might get out, maybe on grounds the trial wasn’t right. You don’t know. But now it’s over.”

“Relief,” Merry says. “Now when the kids get older they won’t see their father.”

Though his death at age 50 is as final as the period at the end of this sentence, it can not set things right. Scott was found dead in his cell Dec. 21 at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield. A Department of Corrections spokesman said Thursday the cause of death is not yet determined; the investigation by DOC and State Police is open.

The best that can be said of the ordeal that changed so many lives is that it also led to state legislation to protect other victims of domestic violence.

Merry and Doug, from the living room of their new home in Wallingford this week, recalled the past that is always present.

“I was lying on the floor, Scott pushed me hard in the chest and I fell. And he pulled a gun out of his pocket, and I thought: ‘How did it come to this?’” Merry says with disbelief, as though it was still the early morning of May 7, 2014.

‘You can’t protect yourself from a gun’

Scott Gellatly was their neighbor, two houses up the hill on Sioux Drive in Oxford, when he took a shine to their pretty 32-year-old daughter Lori, with the strawberry-blonde hair and a good job with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. He swept her off her feet, made her feel special. They had a Florida destination wedding. He had two sons from a previous marriage; in 2012 Lori gave birth to twins, a girl and a boy. Merry retired from her job as a bookkeeper to help take care of them.

“This was our time,” Merry says wistfully. “She was my best friend.”

Before long, though, the warning signs couldn’t be ignored. “He was very controlling,” Merry says. At family gatherings, he would always sit right next to Lori and would pinch her under her arm. He made her drop all her male friends from Facebook.

“If we were out, he would call or text constantly. It got so she didn’t have any friends,” Merry says. She became scared for her daughter’s safety.

Tension escalated to a fight that early spring of 2014 and Lori escaped with the twins to her childhood home down the hill.

She got a temporary restraining order on April 1, but the State Police couldn’t serve it because Scott left for Virginia. A friend there sold him a gun, “a private sale between him and his buddy. It was a legal transaction,” Doug says. No background check needed, in accordance with present law. That law has to change.

Lori had five weeks, from April 1 to May 7.

Merry went to every house on the street and told neighbors to call the police if they saw Scott.

“We had a routine,” Doug says. “When I left for work, Lori would lock the door with a dead bolt and the screen door. But you can’t protect yourself from a gun.”

“We got ADT security in the house,” Merry adds. “Lori and I wore panic buttons if we went outside. We thought if he heard the alarm, he would take off. But you can’t stop crazy.”

“He was crazy to a point,” Doug responds. “His intention was to get her out.”

One state trooper believed she was in danger. He called every night.

But Scott drove back to Connecticut with Virginia plates, undetected. The morning before Lori was going to court for a permanent restraining order — the most dangerous time in these situations — Scott parked at the bottom of the hill, around the corner on Route 67, at dawn.

He waited until Doug left for work, then barged in the kitchen door. He wanted to take Lori with him.

“Our arms were interlocked, he had her by the hair,” Merry recites. He pushed, she fell. Her daughter’s last words were: “Please don’t kill Mommy.”

Scott shot Lori four times, once in the heart. “She didn’t suffer; she died immediately,” her mother realized later. The 18-month-old twins were in an upstairs bedroom, unharmed.

He shot Nika the dog, he shot Merry four times, once near her eye. She spent 12 days in the hospital; her recovery was lengthy. Doug retired to be by her side.

“It plays in my head a lot,” Merry says. “He lost, because he didn’t get her.”

‘He never had remorse’

My husband and I lived next door. We knew the Jacksons and Lori; Doug and Scott often offered to plow our driveway. They were good neighbors in every sense.

Sharp gunshots pierced drowsiness around 5:45 a.m. Screams. As we called 911, from our second-story bedroom window we saw Scott run from the house, the garage door rolled up, Scott backed Merry’s car out and drove up the hill. It was then eerily quiet; not even a dog was barking. We feared the worst. Other neighbors also heard the shots and called 911.

While an ambulance rushed Merry to the hospital, a manhunt ensued to capture Scott. He was found, six hours later, in a fast-food parking lot in Winsted with a hose on the exhaust. Suicide didn’t work, that time.

He ended up pleading guilty and on Nov. 17, 2015 was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

“The hardest thing was to hear him say Lori was his angel,” Merry says.

Living for Lori

Merry could never stay in the home they built together again, where they raised their children, and lived for 28 years, and expected to enjoy in retirement. Merry’s parents and uncle were among the first to buy land in that Swan Lake neighborhood about 70 years earlier. But it could be home no more.

They moved to Wallingford to be near their older daughter, Kacey, who became the legal guardian of her sister’s twins, now 6-years-old. They have Mommy, and they have Mommy Lori in heaven.

How do you patch together lives that will never be the same?

For Lori, they became activists and advocated successfully for a state law to enable police to remove weapons when a restraining order is served. U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal introduced the “Lori Jackson Domestic Violence Survivor Protection Act” to do the same on the federal level, but Congress didn’t pass it. Time to try again.

For Lori, Merry speaks at places such as the State Police Academy, the University of New Haven and Housatonic Community College. She describes the warning signs of an abuser.

For Lori, they help raise money through Bowl-a-Thons (the next is March 3 in Milford) and polar plunges for the Umbrella Center for Domestic Violence Services in Ansonia, where Lori volunteered in high school.

They joined a Survivors of Homicide group that meets monthly. It helps to talk to others who bear the heartache.

Yet every day, there’s the struggle.

“It’s very easy to go into that dark place, but I want to be happy,” Merry says. “It’s very tough. I miss her every day. She’ll never be forgotten.”

Scott is dead. Relief. But lives will never be the same.

“Everything is divided,” Doug says, welling up. “When Lori was alive, and when she wasn’t.”

Jacqueline Smith is an editorial page editor with Hearst Connecticut newspapers; her columns will appear Fridays in this spot. Email her at jsmith@hearstmediact.com; follow on Facebook: Jacqueline Smith, on Twitter: @JackyNT.